Wednesday, 6 February 2013

When a petite 18-year-old left London, with nervous excitement, to study anthropology at university two and a half years ago, she was right to be excited and right to think that, whatever happened, it was all going to be worth it.

Now, with just over two months until I take my last exam and graduate, I should feel outraged. I'm graduating in one of the worst economic recessions in a century, with a degree that doesn't train me to go straight into work, and nearly £30,000 in debt, but I couldn't be happier.

Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep will tell you that university can be seen as a 'liminal' stage in a persons life. Being a student is being in a state of flux, chaos, where your identity is defined by what you are not. You are a non-child and a non-adult, a non-schoolchild and a non-worker.

This is exactly what gives experience at university its importance. I didn't continue anthropology after first year, dropping the biological and opting to focus on the social, but like most students, my university experience has been a rite of passage, one that I think I will enter out of transformed from child to adult, from girl to woman. That's what being a student is. Trying out a recipe for the first time, experimenting with alcohol and Altered States of Consciousness, learning how to pay bills, negotiating with landlords, gaining the scepticism and critical insight to take the world on your own terms.

I may be 14 pounds heavier than the petite 18-year-old I once was, but right now, who cares!

So, I'm sorry for leaving it so long since my last post that I shouldn't count myself a blogger, but I hope you'll understand!!